AT&T Reviews in Sacramento, CA Area

Pros

The employees are great, The pay is decent, and the work is really good..tools and equipment are accessible and most of the training for the basic job is available.

Cons

UNBELIEVEABLE!! how management can spend all of that time and money on a technician and then treat them with the disrespect and untrusting attitude that they do. They talk and treat you as if you were a third grader and get mad when you act like one. How can any relationship or team work together to achieve a common goal when there is no mutual respect. How can any team be sucessful when management makes that fatal mistake of trying to rule by fear and intimidation??

Advice to Senior Management

Your employees are just one of many key assets in a sucessful business. Dont make the mistake of trying to run a busniss soley on grafts and charts. Turn the business back to the local area managers and allow them to make the decisions that is best suited for their areas. Afterall, you do pay them a good salary and hold them accountable for their areas.

Pros

Salaries/benefits. If you define your boundaries, life/work balance is respected and encouraged.

AT&T is THE leader and has so much untapped potential... mostly because of the need to update it's corporate culture and adopt a new, progressive management style.

Cons

So big, makes change slow and cumbersome; but change is constant and frustration can be too; organizational communication is often lacking and change is made with no input from 2nd/1st level managers. It's a dictatorial management style that still drives the company. Unfortunate.

We can be GREAT - but need to look at unneccessary and excessive layers of management. Keep people based on talent, contributions, effectiveness - not politics. Build an engaged, innovated, progressive culture that allows the enterpreneurial spirit to live and where people are rewarded based on their work. That takes trust - up and down and across the board. We've got a lot of work to do in that respect. (Too many mergers - too many insecure, threatened managers in the midst of endless reorgs and downsizing. Hard times.)

Advice to Senior Management

Randall Stephens is successful in communicating the vision but please require communication from organizational leaders to their management teams. With organizations and teams so spread out - and amazing technology that totally supports effective teaming and communication - silent, invisible leaders are not acceptable. Not in such intense times of change. Take the helm for god's sakes. We need REAL leadership - progressive, innovative, trusting/trusted LEADERS. Bring in new blood if needed.

AT&T's culture needs to change. Technology has grown in leaps and bounds; now management style (from the top down) needs to change. There are exceptions and pockets (depending on your organization/manager), but generally, leadership tends to be very closed, non-communicative, distanced and just plain "hands off" - often managing through intimidation and alienation. It is uninspiring and demotivating. We all have to self-motivate, but the trade off of management by intimidation and when organizational "leadership" fails to lead or fails to rally and inspire employees is a disengaged, demotivated workforce. Please... step up and update your thinking. It's time for a "new paradigm" for AT&T. There is no lack of documentation and evidence on effective leadership and it's positive impact.

Also, open up the tuition aid programs to encourage continued education among your employees. It promotes critical thinking and keeps folks growing. You'll get your best from employees in that mindset.

Pros

AT&T is a global company. It has been around for a long time.

Cons

Constant rounds of layoffs, every couple months (if even that) we are being told that they are going to reduce headcount.

Advice to Senior Management

Share what is going on and why. Explain the bigger picture and people will follow with less resistance.

Pros

Our yellow pages have been the best in the business for well over 50 years and have made lots of money for our customers. Our new internet yellowpages.com is producing decently for our small business customers and has potential. Our union makes sure that our individual managers in Sacramento cannot abuse us as much as they'd like to.

Cons

In the internet age, marketing is changing as customers convert to internet advertising. Our management is not smart enough to figure out how to adapt to the changing market, and they blame their own failure on the sales reps that report to them. More than half of our middle managers have no college degree and have never studied pyschology, marketing or management.

Advice to Senior Management

Evaluate the performance of your managers. The number one reason employees at AT&T and across other companies are unhappy on the job is that they feel unappreciated. They want some positive recognition. In our office, all recognition is negative & punative. Who works best in that situation?

Pros

Health care benefits and vacation pay

Cons

It is run by morons. It seems that if you are completely incompetent, you are management material!
You cannot do what is right for the customer and keep your job.

Advice to Senior Management

Skip level meetings and more feedback from the front lines. Obviously not every employee is going to be thrilled with every management call. However, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down. The lower and mid level managers of the directory division are armed with spoonfuls of poison.

Pros

all employees are given discounts on their phone service

Cons

they require you to work manitory overtime

Advice to Senior Management

take the time to listen to the employees without prejudgement

Pros

Benefits, Career Advancement and people.

Cons

If you are not flexible, this is not the place to be. Resiliency is required.

Advice to Senior Management

Before implementing anything that affects our performance reviews, allow the "front line" people to have input from brainstorming to implementation. This gives us a sense of ownership and we bring the experience, especially when it comes to customer satisfaction.

Pros

The company has a defined pension plan along with a 401k.Wages are ok along with a fair benefits package.

Cons

Your just a number, in a big sea of numbers.

Advice to Senior Management

Best practice comes from the bottom up.

Pros

You have telecommunications experience and knowledge and need a job with benefits. and it won't bother you too much to be part of such a poor overall organization.

Cons

The systems are poor and require a lot of manual work by agents to complete tasks. The systems don't communicate with each other where it would improve work production and data accuracy. There is an overall lack of cooperation between different segments, with not much focus on the big picture of what the organization is trying accomplish. Knowledge is horded and not shared, and training is a joke. Even though they talk up the Customer Rules to make customer satisfaction a priority, all the business decisions run contrary to that goal.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop being cheap and developing single use horrible software applications. Open up the purse and spend some money on smart, quality software applications that can positively interact with each other to aid in work production and improve data accuracy especially at the enterprise level. Create a company wiki that is mandatory, so all aspects of the business are clearly detailed with updated group contacts so that even a new employee can easily figure out how to get a problem solved and contact the right group. Stop moving supervisors and managers around so much. That might be alright in a well defined and productive corporation, but that's not AT&T. Supervisors need to have detailed job knowledge of their groups to smooth out the flaws within AT&T. I would also focus attention at the first two levels of management as they're hurting the company. So many know they don't belong in management, and they spend their time doing the minimum and staying off the radar instead of fighting for the change so desperately needed. Loosen up the purse and actually spend some money on training your employees. So many people doing the work haven't had proper training, and their mistakes are negatively impacting customer experiences. Refocus on processes and create an entirely new format that is easy to use and search instead of the poor Word Documents we see now.